— Can June come fast enough? That’s when Andre 3000 takes on the role of Jimi Hendrix in Jimi: All Is by My Side. It seems like we should expect intricate guitarmanship from the Outkast performer.

— Apple is working diligently to convince music executives to sell digital albums on iTunes, before allowing new releases to stream for free elsewhere.

— A new video from Beyoncé and Jane Lynch tells girls to remove “bossy” from their vocabulary. The two have teamed up with Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In Foundation, which launched the Ban Bossy campaign to inspire leadership among girls.

— Hollywood needs to take Cate Blanchett’s advice and cast more women in lead roles, because, right now, the movie industry is failing.

]]>Will America Welcome The Return Of ’24’?http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2014/01/17/3167321/24-homeland-tyrant-political-evolution-howard-gordon/
Fri, 17 Jan 2014 15:45:59 +0000Alyssa Rosenberghttp://thinkprogress.org/default/2014/01/15/3167321//http://d35brb9zkkbdsd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Howard-Gordon-Tyrant-321x214.jpgHoward Gordon's become television's most prolific interpreter of America under threat since 9/11. What will happen when he leaves the United States behind?

]]>“Jack is sort of the Rorschach test over the years,” 24 writer and executive producer Howard Gordon said in a room full of journalists at the Television Critics Association press tour this week. Gordon was there to promote 24: Live Another Day, a limited-series follow-up to the hit series about Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), the terrorist-fighting federal agent who became notorious for his use of torture. “He’s been politicized,” Gordon added. “And when you really think about it, he’s really this remarkably apolitical character.”

That’s not an assessment that many of 24‘s critics would share. But it’s an important one to consider, because in the years since Americans first met, and embraced, Jack Bauer, Gordon has become one of the busiest men in television. And he’s done so by becoming the most prolific interpreter in the medium of where America stands in relation to the rest of the world in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. On 24, he wrote more episodes of the show than anyone but 24‘s creators. At Showtime, he and Alex Gansa won acclaim for creating Homeland, a drama about the damage September 11 had done to CIA agents, and the harm that they were doing to ordinary people living in Middle Eastern countries–and to each other–in response to that trauma. And now, for FX, Gordon is working with Gideon Raff to create Tyrant, what could be considered the third entry in a trilogy with 24 and Homeland, and that takes audiences from the United States to a fictional Middle Eastern country.Gordon has become one of the busiest men in television. And he’s done so by becoming the most prolific interpreter in the medium of where America stands in relation to the rest of the world in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

Tyrant, which follows a man who went into self-imposed exile from the Middle Eastern dictatorship where he grew up, only to return for a family function and get caught up in the affairs of state, asks the question, Gordon says, “do people want to see a show over there, anywhere but here?” The key to the show’s success may be whether fans of Gordon’s previous work are psychologically prepared to embrace a story that doesn’t have American security as a leading concern, and to empathize with residents of the kind of country that in previous television shows has functioned primarily as a source of people who want to attack the United States.

24 had two animating ideas: that the United States was constantly under credible, massive threats by foreign countries, and that the country possessed the resources to thwart those threats if only it had the will to exercise them. Each season was meant to depict what happened, in real time, as Jack Bauer responded to imminent dangers, often using force and torture to elicit information about his targets (notably, when Jack himself was tortured, he, unlike his targets, successfully resisted talking). It’s true that some of the show’s villains were right-leaning, and that Jack Bauer was portrayed as damaged by his actions. But the show’s ticking time-bomb scenarios weighted the show’s cost-benefit calculation such that Jack’s actions were always necessary no matter the toll.

The show’s producers are adamant that these calculations don’t imply a political stance. Manny Coto, who is executive producing 24: Live Another Day and executive produced 24, said at TCA that “this idea that it’s conservative or left is kind of baffling to all of us, frankly, because some of the season long arcs could have been a Michael Moore fantasy as well.”

But the problem wasn’t the political orientation of the villains providing each season’s apocalyptic scenario. It was how the structure of the show reinforced support for a specific tactic. Torture may have been an apolitical issue once, when the thought of it elicited disgust across the political spectrum. But during 24‘s ascent, a political split–one that was more complicated than a simple left-right divide–opened up about the use of what the Bush administration renamed “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a legalistic term that was meant to protect the people who used those techniques. By suggesting those tactics work, 24 became political, if not simply partisan.

And that aspect of the show had a real-world impact. As Jane Mayer reported in a 2007 New Yorker feature about the show, in 2006 U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, who was then the dean of West Point, met with Gordon and other 24 staff to ask them to consider changing the show’s approach to the use of torture because of the way it was affecting his students.

“It had become increasingly hard to convince some cadets that America had to respect the rule of law and human rights, even when terrorists did not,” Mayer wrote that Finnegan had explained to the producers. “One reason for the growing resistance, he suggested, was misperceptions spread by 24, which was exceptionally popular with his students. As he told me, ‘The kids see it, and say, “If torture is wrong, what about 24?'” He continued, ‘The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.'”

24: Live Another Day will bring back a Jack Bauer who is alienated from his country. But he’ll return in a media environment that’s been complicated by characters of Gordon’s own creation.

Gordon is a professional, and it’s hard to imagine him suddenly disavowing the show that helped break out his career after stints on The X-Files, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel. When I asked him how Jack Bauer fits into an America that’s no longer tensed for the next attack, and where many people have reacted with disgust to the U.S. government’s use of torture, he was characteristically measured, using a kind of language he’d employ to describe Tyrant the next day.

“It’s become a more complex world than it was when we began 24,” Gordon said of that show. “Things seemed, at least, you know, simpler at the time. And Jack has, I think, you know, acted in ways that have challenged his behavior. Jack has grown with it.”

What does that mean for 24: Live Another Day? At the end of the series’ original run, Jack Bauer went on the run after having been persuaded not to murder participants in an effort to cover up the Russian government’s involvement a terrorist plot intended to keep nuclear treaty talks on track. And President Allison Taylor (Cherry Jones) made a decision that was in striking contrast to 24‘s general approach to its ticking time bombs. While the show suggested that stopping terrorism was worth moral compromise and psychological damage, Taylor determined that she couldn’t sign a treaty won by coercion and violence, no matter how important that treaty might have been, and announced her plans to turn herself in to be prosecuted.

Coto explained that when the sequel begins, a CIA agent (Yvonne Strahovski) will be looking for Jack, who has been a fugitive for four years, a dynamic that bears more than a passing resemblance to Carrie Mathison’s (Claire Danes) obsessive pursuit of Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban) in Homeland. Fellow Counter Terrorist Unit agent Chloe O’Brian (Mary Lynn Rajskub), who ended the series letting Jack get away and vowing to expose the machinations behind the treaty “is almost a more radical, a Snowden type character.” Whether she ends up exposing both Jack’s use of torture and the Taylor administration’s relationships with a Russian government that supported terrorism, and where 24: Live Another Day comes down on the cumulative impact of Bauer’s approach to national security is an open question. But as long as the possibility of a 24 movie is still alive, and Jack Bauer needs to be available as a hero, Bauer seems more likely to be vindicated than excoriated.

Gordon suggested that when it comes to issues like torture, “as long as you are bringing them up honestly, it’s not Jack’s job to adjudicate those, you know, what’s right or what’s wrong, just to enjoy the complexity of these things and just put it out there.” But asking that Jack Bauer repent his years in the Counter Terrorist Unit is not the same thing as being curious as to whether the show about his adventures can, or is interested in, putting some daylight between how 24 sees him, and how he sees himself.“It’s not Jack’s job to adjudicate…what’s right or what’s wrong.”

That sort of distance has, at various times, existed on Homeland, which follows Mathison, who had been deeply traumatized by a sense that she ought to have spotted the signs that the September 11 attacks were imminent. Homeland has the same tendency to affirm Mathison’s obsession with Seargent Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) that 24 did with Bauer’s extreme tactics. Though Carrie’s bosses believed that Brody wasn’t a terrorist, it turned out that she was correct that he was planning an attack.

That’s the point at which Homeland and 24 diverged. Carrie ended up preventing Brody’s attack mostly by accident, after her conversation with Brody’s daughter Dana led Dana to call him. But a technical malfunction and Brody’s deep inner conflict also contributed to his decision not to detonate a suicide bomb in a bunker full of government officials, including the Vice President. Carrie didn’t torture anyone to stop an attack. And ultimately, she was only one part of why it was thwarted.

Preventing one act of terrorism also didn’t mean that Carrie could prevent several others. Brody was first coerced into assisting another assassination attempt on Vice President Walden (Jamey Sheridan), then embraced his role with relish — once the possibility of collateral damage and suicide were removed from the equation, he proved all too happy to murder the man he believed had killed children with a drone strike. At the end of the third season, another enemy emerged, and carried out a successful bombing of the CIA headquarters during a memorial for Walden.

The CIA couldn’t respond to a ticking time bomb in a white SUV because they didn’t know it existed. Carrie herself recognized that the car had been moved only seconds before the bomb exploded. It was a striking reminder of the complexity of counterterrorism, and of the limited capacities of American national security agencies. In 24, Jack Bauer could almost single-handedly save America over and over again. Homeland at its best has been a counterargument that individuals or small cells can utterly confound the bureaucracies the United States has built to protect itself.

In Tyrant, Gordon and his collaborator Raff, who created Prisoners Of War, the Israeli series on which Homeland was loosely based, are leaving the American national security state entirely behind. The series follows Barry Al Fayeed (Adam Rayner), the son of the dictator who rules the fictional state of Baladi (Arabic for “of the country”), who has chosen to live, work as a doctor, and raise his family in America. Barry hasn’t returned to his home country for decades, but succumbs to pressure from his wife, who is eager to see Baladi and meet Barry’s extended family, and from his father and brother, and agrees to return home for his niece’s wedding. Circumstances keep the family from leaving the country. And Barry, who’s never wanted anything to do with his family’s rule of the country and their brutal repression of an insurgency that uses terrorism as a tactic, has to figure out how to reconcile the ideals that guided his flight and the demands that are being placed upon him.

When I asked Gordon how the show would help viewers make a psychological shift from rooting for American security to concern for the well-being of an absolutist state, he said he thought that television audiences had plenty of prior analogues in shows like The Tudors or Game of Thrones. These palace intrigues, he suggested, made it easy for them to get excited about political machinations in countries not their own. And he said that we would get to know Baladi along with Barry, who’s become largely unfamiliar with his own country during his years in exile, and that “the mechanics of that succession are going to be part of the drama of the show.”

But simply changing settings doesn’t necessarily remove the polarities that have often been present in the shows Gordon’s worked on. The central tension of Tyrant, Gordon suggested, is “Can this man, this good man, this good American man hold onto that good American person and affect the transition that this country is about to have.” Gordon doesn’t want Tyrant to be simply about a Westernized doctor being corrupted by a decadent and fictional Middle Eastern culture, but rather by power itself. But that oversimplified narrative is the worst version of what Tyrant could become if Gordon and Raff aren’t careful. “We want to be, sensitive, I think, to potential mischaracterizations,” Gordon said, suggesting that gay characters and women, like Barry’s mother (who is of European origin) and his brother’s wife, would be vectors by which Tyrant punctures popular perceptions of Middle Eastern countries.

And, promisingly, Gordon told me that “in some ways, I’m as interesting in poking holes in the hubris of American intervention sometimes, of what that might look like.” The main vehicle for that set of ideas appears to be one of the people Barry meets on his return: John Tucker (Justin Kirk), an American diplomat who seems more concerned with the Al Fayeed family’s success in bolstering Baladi’s per capita income than with the regime’s record of human rights abuses. “One of the things we want to do is not be reductive but also honor the complexities of and the folly of American policy, and the law of unintended consequences makes for very good drama,” Gordon said of the character. “We’re going to be equal opportunity offenders, and that’s kind of his job.”

There are also at least some images of civil society in Baladi. Fares Fares, who played a CIA agent in Zero Dark Thirty, also appears in the show as Fauzi Nadal, an old friend of Barry’s who has become a dissident journalist who advocates for a transition from dictatorship to democracy. “He’s sort of the Trotsky of the insurgency,” Gordon joked to me, suggesting that Fauzi was a voice for change, but a strong opponent of terrorist tactics. And Gordon said “there is this place Ma’an which has been the traditional antagonist of our capital city and in which and so we’ll see plenty of that place, which really becomes this the sort of hotbed of the insurgency.”

Gordon explained that Tyrant “was born, you know, out of Gidi’s head but from the ongoing story of the Arab Spring. And, again, I think we’re all experiencing this as our parochial view. This is a story that predated 9/11, but certainly for our minds and to our minds, we realized we’re part of a world that is not an ocean and several continents away but very much here…24 was an iteration of that story, was a facet; Homeland, yet again another facet, but all facets of the same story which, again, I think is the story of our time.”

But it’s striking for Gordon to be resurrecting a creation like Jack Bauer, who’s very much a reaction to a particular political moment, at the same time that he’s trying to push into new physical and intellectual territory, as Gordon is with Tyrant. 24: Live Another Day premieres on Fox on May 5, while Tyrant will air at some point this summer. Curious about the contrast, I asked him if there were “ideas that showed up in 24 that you no longer think are valid as you’re making Tyrant.”I asked if there were “ideas that showed up in 24 that you no longer think are valid as you’re making Tyrant.”

“No,” he said. “The thing I’ve learned and the only thing I probably would ever want to express dramatically is just the more I get to know, the more I realize I don’t know. I think what we are trying to illustrate and dramatize is just complexity, great drama. I think the thing that those three shows, hopefully, and this show have in common is that there aren’t good answers. There’s just the least bad of two bad choices.”

“You don’t want to be the last one caught holding a dog collar.” -Dan, Zero Dark Thirty

When Fox announced that it was bringing back 24, its serialized drama about counterterrorist federal agent Jack Bauer that finished its initial run in 2010, as a limited-episode special event in 2014, much of the commentary about the news focused on questions of structure, rather than content. Time Magazine television critic James Poniewozik argued that 24’s resurrection was part of an exciting move by Fox to make more limited series and more special events, a strategy that includes a shorter run for its serial killer hit The Following, a move that both was meant to accomodate star Kevin Bacon’s schedule and to ape the success of dark cable dramas with shorter runs, and an order of limited-run series Wayward Pines. Others saw it as part of Fox’s decision to walk away from a focus on female-focused comedies and return to an old, reliable—and male-centered—hit from its past. But I’m curious about another question. How is Jack Bauer, whose use of torture, as reported by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, prompted U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan to meet with the producers of 24 to talk to them about how the show was affecting American soldiers, going to play in a world where pop culture has become more thoughtful and searing about the impact of these tactics on both both the tortured and torturers themselves?

One of the most painful depictions of torture presently airing appears on HBO’s medieval fantasy Game of Thrones, where the destruction of Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen), formerly a spoiled ward of the Stark family, and now the prisoner of a man who appears to be systematically remolding him according to a monstrous blueprint. It’s a storyline that’s been so grotesque and emotionally agonizing that it’s turned off some critics like The Atlantic’s Christopher Orr, who have found themselves exhausted by what they see as an exploitative element to the proceedings, which are presented only in flashbacks in the novels on which the show is based.

But the relentless return to Theon’s cell, to his crucifixion, flaying, hooding, starvation, sexual manipulation, and last week, emasculation, seems precisely like the point, even if it’s so unpleasant to watch that I’ve taken to peeking at those scenes through my fingers on the first go-round and leaving the room for the second. Theon can’t escape his torture, and neither can we. His lead torturer tells him that “this isn’t happening for a reason,” and in point of fact in the narrative, it’s mostly not. The only new information Theon reveals, that he has not actually murdered the heirs to Winterfell, a Northern stronghold, doesn’t defuse a ticking time bomb scenario, but gets filed away for reference. “You’ve already told me everything, remember? Your daddy was mean to you. The Starks didn’t appreciate you. One good bit, though. The Stark boys. They’re still alive. Wouldn’t that be a hunt to remember?” the mysterious man reflects menacingly. When Theon asks “Where am I? Who are you? What do you want?” one of that man’s henchmen replies, “I want to do this.” Torture is arbitrary and endless, a manifestation of insanity, whether that madness is innate or simply the logical place men arrive at during an endless war.

And whatever else torture is, Theon’s destruction is systematic. Theon’s first made to feel ignorant, begging “About what? I don’t know what you want!” when asked to tell an unspecified truth. His position is stripped from him. “I’ll make you a Lord of the Iron Islands for this,” he tells a man who poses as his rescuer before revealing himself to be the architect of Theon’s misery. “We’re not in the Iron Islands,” the man reminds him blandly. Theon, who once had a reputation for his sexual appetites, discovers that in war, being male doesn’t guarantee you either sexual happiness or sexual autonomy when one of his captors threatens him with rape in retaliation for an escape attempt. His expectations that anyone will be merciful are slowly dismantled. “Water. You want some water?” his main torturer asks Theon, then tells him “I wish I had some for you,” while pouring out the water on the floor. And bit by bit, his corporeal body is pared away, first a finger Theon begs the man to cut off after it’s been flayed, hoping amputation will relieve his pain, and then his genitalia, taken from him as a way of robbing Theon of the part of his identity that’s bound up in his sexual prowess. “No, mercy, please. Mercy, mercy,” Theon cries as his emasculation approaches. “This is mercy,” his torturer tells him. “I’m not killing you. Just making a few alterations.” It’s an efficient and nasty definition of what torture is, not an intelligence-gathering technique, not a tool that must only be used occasionally with great regret, but the process of turning someone into something else, and often something less. And Game of Thrones is making sure that its audience understands the full weight of that process.

Homeland, the War on Terror drama from Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, the creators of 24, that’s set closer to home in both time and proximity has made a similar point over its first two seasons. One of the main characters, suspected double agent Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), is tortured twice. First, after he is captured by the terrorist Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban), Brody is forced to fight his fellow captive Tom Walker (Chris Chalk) until—he believes—he has killed the other man, and then he is required to bury Walker himself. He is held not just in solitary confinement, but in a windowless cell, for an extremely long period of time, until he is released into the custody of Nazir, who gives him food, introduces him into Islam, and most importantly, entrusts Brody with the care of his son Issa. After Brody returns to the United States and declines to carry out his suicide mission, he comes into the custody of the CIA, where an analyst stabs him in a hand. That treatment, in both cases, may not meet the Bush administration’s definition of torture as treatment that results in “organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” but it is forbidden by the Geneva Conventions.

And in both cases, Brody’s experiences as a survivor of torture are critical to building sympathy for him and understanding of his motivations. Brody was a loyal soldier, rather than an inherently evil man—which is often the way terrorists are understood in the public imagination—before Abu Nazir used torture to shape him into a terrorist. And after he decided not to carry out an attack on the Vice President and much of the military leadership of the United States, hoping instead that he could satisfy Nazir and change American policy through his work as a member of Congress, the CIA pursued and tortured him anyway. Homeland eventually became a more baroque show as the second season wore on, and Brody was blackmailed into murdering the Vice President anyway. Without that twist, Homeland might have been a more focused show about the consequences of torture, acts that lead Brody to betray his home country, his family, and his oaths of service, and then, after he had tried to reestablish his loyalty, exiled him from it.

On Scandal, torturers can also be torture victims. In the first season of the show, the hyper-competent, power-drill-wielding Huck, played with enormous sensitivity and menace by Guillermo Díaz in what is now one of the most underrated performances on television, was mostly the tool of last resort in fixer Olivia Pope’s (Kerry Washington) kit. This year, we saw him become the victim of torture twice. First, after he was framed for the attempted assassination of Presidential Fitzgerland Grant (Tony Goldwyn)—this being a soap opera, the real killer was a woman Huck met in the AA meetings he meets to handle his addiction to murder, instilled in him by his handlers at the CIA—Huck was beaten and waterboarded in an attempt to force him to confess. But unlike the ticking time bomb scenarios in 24, the terrible blow against the nation was in the past, rather than hovering menacingly in the future, and torturing Huck produced no useful information about the author of that act, because he had none to give.

Later, in a devastating episode, “Seven Fifty-Two,” we learned that this was not the first time Huck had been tortured. Huck has long had an obsession with watching placid-looking American families, and “Seven Fifty-Two” explained why: he was once a soldier with a lovely girlfriend, before he was recruited to join a secret torture-and-assassinations squad. During his time with that squad, and against regulations, Huck managed the trauma he was forced to inflict on other people by throwing himself into that relationship as a form of balance and penance. He married his girlfriend, cried with joy when she had their child, and kept his drill and his plastic sheeting safely at the office. But when Huck’s family was discovered by his boss, he was separated from them and thrown into a hole in the ground until he was so broken that he denied their existence. And when Huck repented, he was abandoned by the agency, yet another homeless, mentally ill veteran dumped onto Washington’s streets.

In the season finale of Scandal, Huck, his humanity somewhat restored to him, falters when he’s asked to torture a man to get information about the location of a card that holds data that proved the existence of a vote-rigging scheme that tilted the presidency to Grant. “I can’t do it. I thought I could, but I can’t,” he tells his colleague Quinn (Katie Lowes). “But she needs the card. Liv needs the card.” Sensing his desperation, Quinn grabs the drill and plunges it into their captive’s thigh. The man eventually tells them the number of a safe deposit box where the card is held, but it turns out his suffering and Quinn’s moral compromise have been in vain: the card in the bank is a decoy. Later, Quinn, herself a victim of brainwashing and identity theft, talks ecstatically about her first experience torturing another human being. “Watching him beg and scream, it was such a rush,” she tells Huck. But instead of applauding her, Huck slams a door in Quinn’s face and retreats to the darkness. He’s passed the ability and willingness to torture her like a disease.

And even when torturers don’t themselves become the victims of tactics similar to those that they employ, the experience of torturing other people is presented as profoundly damaging in Zero Dark Thirty. Dan (Jason Clarke) begins the movie as a jovial torturer who calls his victim, Ammar (Reda Kateb) “dude” and “man” with a repulsive familiarity, and shows little concern for his colleague Maya’s (Jessica Chastain) mental health as he uses her presence to sexually humiliate Ammar and enlists her help in waterboarding him. But Dan’s work eventually burns him out and he leaves for Washington, DC, telling Maya “I’ve seen too many guys naked…I’ve got to do something normal for a while. You should come with me. You’re looking a little strung out yourself.” I wouldn’t say Dan exactly redeems himself by switching from stuffing men in tiny wooden boxes to buying corrupt rich boys yellow sports cars with CIA money, a transition that doesn’t precisely involve truth and reconciliation, but it does provide a key, and torture-free, break in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Maya never quite takes his advice, and after she identifies bin Laden’s body, she finds herself utterly alone.

Howard Gordon, the 24 creator who went on to make Homeland, which has a rather different perspective on the War on Terror, with his partner Alex Gansa, told the New York Times that Bauer “has evolved through the years, and this new and exciting event series format is perfect to tell the next chapter of his story and continue to reflect how the world is changing.” I imagine that Huck and Quinn, Maya and Dan, Carrie and Brody, and Theon Greyjoy and the Boy, all might have an idea or two about those changes, and where Jack Bauer fits within them.

Every decade gets the political show it deserves, or thinks it deserves, though some decades are pretty disingenuous. “The West Wing” gave us an idealized account of the Clinton era, with a saintly president and high-minded pols. In the ’00s, “24” offered an ultraparanoid version of the Bush era that legitimized torture as the primary means of dealing with a world in a constant state of crisis.

“Veep,” by contrast, comes not to justify Caesar but to goose him. It captures our post-Reagan, post-Clinton, post-Bush, 24-hour tabloid news and Internet-haterade dystopia, and reflects our collective queasy ambivalence toward a political system that we fear simply reflects our own shallowness back at us. If “The West Wing” was a fantasy of hyper-competence, “Veep” is its opposite: a black-humor vision of politics at its bleakest, in which both sides have been co-opted by money and special interests and are reduced to posturing, subterfuge, grandstanding and photo ops. Naturally, it’s hilarious.

This is true—I’ve seen the pilot for Veep—and it’s uproarious. But it’s not the only show that gets this, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

Last night’s Scandal ended with an uproarious parody of the idea that if we got lawmakers of both parties in the room and talked things over sensibly, that Reason Would Prevail and everything would be all right. Faced with a Supreme Court nominee who was facing a prostitution scandal (the hooker he’s patronized turned out to be his wife), gladiator-in-a-suit crisis fixer Olivia Pope combed a DC madam’s records, figured out which Senators had also been her clients, had her minions seek out said men and drop the code words for the sex acts they’d been ordering up all those years, and blackmailed them into keeping their traps shut. It’s an utterly nonsensical scenario, but not actually more nonsensical than the idea that our politicians are people of good will we can just pull together and everything will be all right.

It remains to be seen if USA’s Political Animals, about a First Lady-turned-Secretary of State and her dysfunctional family, and NBC’s 1600 Penn, which will be out this fall, take the same tack. And it’s true that we don’t lack a serious show in the vein of 24, though Homeland‘s paranoia’s aimed more at the national security bureaucracy than at proving we should have all means at our disposal to wring information out of terrorists. But is interesting that a truly idealistic show hasn’t thrived in the age of Obama. Maybe it’s the the ridiculousness of our politics has consequences bigger than the President’s sex life this time around, and idealism would actually be kind of a downer.

]]>’24’ Is Turning Into a Moviehttp://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2011/12/06/383146/24-is-turning-into-a-movie/
Tue, 06 Dec 2011 19:25:35 +0000Alyssa Rosenberghttp://thinkprogress.org/?p=383146The post ’24’ Is Turning Into a Movie appeared first on ThinkProgress.
]]>Jack Bauer is back. I’m encouraged that Billy Ray, who I adore, is reportedly doing the script. But I sort of wonder if Bauer feels a little outdated, if 24‘s creators have outdone themselves with Homeland. I’d sort of like to see Bauer go mano a mano with Carrie Mathison.

]]>We Have Our Arts So We Won’t Die of Truth: In Support of Political Fictionhttp://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2011/06/07/237982/we-have-our-arts-so-we-wont-die-of-truth-in-favor-of-political-art/
Tue, 07 Jun 2011 14:31:38 +0000Alyssa Rosenberghttp://thinkprogress.org/?p=237982The post We Have Our Arts So We Won’t Die of Truth: In Support of Political Fiction appeared first on ThinkProgress.
]]>I think Megan McArdle has some interesting arguments in this post arguing that we should keep our politics and our art separate, but I think, taken cumulatively, it’s the equivalent of not just throwing the baby out with the bathwater but defenestrating it. I want to focus on a central section of Megan’s essay, because I’m less concerned with whether we should keep enjoying art by people once we learn dreadful things about either their personal lives or their political views (I think we should) than the role art plays in shaping our morality and politics. Megan writes:

Art isn’t very good stand-in for Sunday School teachers, for all that we repeatedly imbue it with the job of shaping morality–“poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, said Shelley, and it’s a damn good thing he was wrong. Having a keen eye for detail, a a morose grasp of the tragedy of the human condition, and hypertrophied verbal mental muscles does not make you a good policy analyst. George Orwell, who was more of a gimlet-eyed realist than most ideological writers, nonetheless believed a fair amount of ludicrous nonsense, such as his assertions that collectivism was necessary because a capitalist society could never produce enough to win World War II…But when art-as-politics airbrushes out the dead people at the steel works, it can be very convincing, which is why advocates like it; Uncle Tom’s Cabin did more for the Abolitionist cause than a hundred thousand lectures. The problem is, it can convince of the bad as easily as the good–Gone With the Wind reached many more people than Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in part because–despite its ugly racial politics–it’s a much better book with richer characters and more believable action…Authors aren’t good policy architects. They’re also not good moral philosophers–they’re good at dramatizing moral conundrums, which is not the same thing as resolving them…I am not arguing that artists are generally bad people, but merely that we have no evidence that they’re better than us–all of them are at least as flawed as we are. And we’re pretty flawed.

But focusing on fiction as policy proscription is an awfully limited way to look at the political work fiction does, and what readers and watchers are supposed to take away from that art. To my mind, there are three broad categories of that work: to help us approach and understand our history and the conditions of our present; to frame positions in the debates of the day; and to provide space to play with policy and political ideas, an underlooked element in a rigidified political process that is deeply suspicious of error and evolution.

The Holocaust, for example, is an event of such terrible enormity that we cannot assimilate it in a single go, or through a single medium. I know I’ve needed The Diary of Anne Frank, and Victor Klemperer’s accounts of the rise of Nazi bureaucracy, Hannah Arendt’s clear-eyed reporting on Adolf Eichmann’s trial, Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust. But I’ve also approached the systematic extermination of Jews, of gays, of the disabled, and of many other categories of people through Art Spiegelman’s Maus (also recommended: In The Shadow of No Towers, not least for its riffs on Little Nemo In Slumberland), through Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories, through Isaac Bachevis Singer’s Hanukkah stories set in the Warsaw Ghetto and under tsarist rule in Russia, through the repeated image of young Magneto tearing at the gates of a concentration camp, through Cryptonomicon, through The Debt, due out in August. Sometimes, our reconciliation with the truth of our politics and history comes both in stark confrontation with the facts. And sometimes we need to sidle up to those facts before we can face them, to circle back through multiple perspectives, to reach for scriptural language whether in testimony or in fiction, to help us grapple with the enormity of our glory and catastrophe. “Milton does more than drunk God can,” Ray Bradbury wrote, “To justify Man’s way toward Man.”
On the question of illuminating positions, I think Megan’s wrong that fiction needs to resolve our moral conundrums rather than simply outline them, or to argue for a correct position, to be useful. Is there any question that 24 did artistic work to justify torture? That a casual attitude towards abuse of prisoners in our most popular crime shows is corrosive to justice? That Michael Bay’s movies white-wash the military? But would it be better for us to have a world without those works if it means foregoing the condemnations of torture and meditations on the laws of war of Battlestar Galactica? The critique of traditional police work that is The Wire? The Hurt Locker‘s quiet tragedy? Art takes us to the places we can’t go. Sometimes it lies about what we’d find there, sometimes it misunderstands what it’s trying to see through the wavery glass of prison doors and tank windows. This is why it’s bad to read just one book, to read Gone With the Wind or Atlas Shrugged, or watch Birth of a Nation or Battleship Potemkin and nothing else. But it’s useful to read Gone With the Wind next to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: knowing that Confederate nostalgia is wrong, and racist, doesn’t obliterate the need to understand that people feel it, and are strongly influenced by those feelings. Resolving the moral conundrum is ultimately our work, not any one author of any one work’s, and it doesn’t make sense to fault fiction for that.

And finally, of course Megan’s right that “the people in stories never lived; they only struggled with the limited problems that the author gave them, and they only overcame them with the author’s help.” And of course it’s true that artists can use the powers of narrative and character to obscure what actual policy outcomes would result if we lived in a world with collectivized agriculture, or everyone was infertile, or people were economically privileged based on their genetics. But when the problems facing us are so significant that, in some cases, we can’t really grapple with their magnitude head-on, speculative fiction can help us play with what we’d do if we were starting human society over millions of years in the past or in the future on Mars; to wonder how we might triage care in a world where everyone had access to health care but a plague struck; to imagine what it might be like if gender roles were radically reversed or if reproduction happened outside the womb. At a moment policy orthodoxy leads parties to march cheerfully on cliffs and dissension gets lawmakers labeled kooks or traitors, I think we need more spaces where we play with ideas about policy and values, where we can experiment with the truly ridiculous and walk away with a mote of a useable idea, not fewer.

And even if creators aren’t intentionally working in one of these categories, their work is political whether they will it to or no. An assumption that a police investigation will treat victims and the accused fairly is a political assumption. An alien invasion movie in which the United States marshals the world unity necessary to repel an attack has a definite if unsubtle point of view about American hard and soft power. And romances may, as Megan suggests, rot the brain, but that doesn’t mean the way they assign values to things like marriage and careers are apolitical. The presence of veiled politics, especially veiled bad politics, in art isn’t a reason not to produce political art at all. Rather, it’s a case for engaged reading.

And really, even more than the idea that there’s just one way art can do political work, I’m befuddled by the idea of the passive reader that seems to pervade Megan’s piece. It’s not as if we amble into Fahrenheit 451 and emerge with a comprehensive plan to save literature and improve the education system through a strong program of rote memorization, or walk out of Avatar and pass legislation banning mining on inhabited planets. Art is playground, context, fodder—not marching papers, and not a straightforward recruiting tool.

To paraphrase Ta-Nehisi—if you need the warning, which I think is most unnecessary if you read this blog—don’t read Kim Stanley Robinson, or George Orwell, or Salman Rushdie, or Jane Austen because you need someone to tell you what to think about the prospect of engineering the climate, or running a colonial government, or running a post-colonial government, or how to adjust property inheritance laws to help liberate women. Read them, watch Kings, listen to Pete Seeger, because it’s part of figuring out what kind of world we should live in. And care deeply about what you consume because we are what we love, the sublime and the rotten both. To quote Bradbury again, “We have our arts so we won’t die of truth”—and so we can midwife new ones into being.